Diane Setterfield - THE THIRTEENTH TALE
Anchor Canada - 2007
Absolutely spell-binding ... I couldn't put this book down ... and when the number of pages grew thinner, my reading slowed as I did not want it to end! Absolutely brilliant ... I fell in love with all the characters, could hear the creaks of the floor boards at Angelfield ... and could smell the mustiness of the books in the bookstore.
An amazing story about story-telling told by an incredible story-teller ... riveting with layers upon layers of tales and plot twists.
Diane Setterfield has an ease with words ... and a beautiful way of stringing them together.
One of my favorite passages:
"My job is not to sell books - my father does that- but to look after them. Every so often I take out a volume and read a page or two. After all, reading is looking after in a manner of speaking. Not old enought to be valuable for their age alone, nor important enough to be sought after by collectors, my charges are dear to me even if, as often as not, they are as dull on the inside as on the outside. No matter how banal the contents, there is always something that touches me. For someone now dead once thought these words significant enough to write them down.
People disappear when they die. Their voice, their laughter, the warmth of their breath. Their flesh. Eventually their bones. All living memory of them ceases. This is both dreadful and natural. Yet for some there is an exception to this annihilation. For in the books they write they continue to exist. We can rediscover them. Their humour, their tone of voice, their moods. Through the written word they can anger you or make you happy. They can comfort you. They can perplex you. They can alter you. All this, even though they are dead. Like flies in amber, like corpses frozen in ice, that which according to the laws of nature should pass away is, by the miracle of ink on paper, preserved. It is a kind of magic.
As one tends the graves of the dead, so I tend the books. I clean them, do minor repairs, keep them in good order. And every day I open a volume or two, read a few lines or pages, allow the voices of the forgotten dead to resonate inside my head. Do they sense it, these dead writers, when their books are read? Does a pinprick of light appear in their darkness? Is their soul stirred by the feather touch of another mind reading theirs? I do hope so. For it must be very lonely being dead."
But this wondrous work of fiction is not just a book about books and stories and tales ... but of people, families and truth ...
